Agile Programming

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Written on March 24th, 2010

Improve Munin stats page with new layout and plugins

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rect2844 Improve Munin stats page with new layout and pluginsWhen the  number of your servers is increasing more than you have expected, is a good practice to have a friend that  helps you track what’s happenning on those.

For this I use, among other apps, Munin. Munin is a “networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze resource trends and [...] problems” according to its site.

But this post isn’t a howto-install guide but a how to personalize and extend munin to fit your requirements, just with a custom layout and new plugins.

Layout

I don’t like the default theme of munin. There is an alternative template at http://www.doeeng.com/ and a live demo. There are detailed instructions to install and customize there so I won’t touch it here. Seems that original webpage is down so let me explain the installation process.

You can download a tarball containing the alternative template from http://mabishu.com/downloads/munin-alternative-template.tbz
For installing just move the /etc/munin/templates to /etc/munin/templates_old, extract this tarball in /etc/munin/ and verify that this creates a new template folder. Just a puntualization, for me is far better the ”template-light” so you have to change the import in index.css to get it.

Plugins

Is very simple to install plugins for munin. You only have to drop it on /usr/share/munin/plugins and after that make a symbolic link from /etc/munin/plugins to it.

Fortunately, on Debian systems when you install munin and munin-node there is  some plugins installed. Indeed, that plugins would cover all your needs but if you need more you can install “munin-plugins-extra” and on Ubuntu Lucid you can install “munin-libvirt-plugins” and “munin-java-plugins“.

Additionally, Munin has the MuninExchange site that is a central point when all the users send their plugins to share with all with open licences. There is a lot of plugins but I have to highligth Memcache plugin, sshd_log, and apache

Might be interested on:

  • http://www.ccspquestions.com ccsp

    I read your post and totally agree with you.Its nice sharing.web sites are source of information and this is one of them I book mark it and mail all of my friends to must check it.

  • admin

    Hi ccsp,

    I’m glad you share our web site among your friends. Soon I’ll write more posts with useful information.

    Regards

  • http://jdasher.com James Dasher

    So I’m definitely interested in this alternate theme, however the website is down, and I can’t find the file, would you be able to make it available?

  • http://www.mabishu.com Fran Diéguez

    Sure, let me get from one of my servers and make a tarball.

  • http://www.mabishu.com Fran Diéguez

    Hi again James,

    you can download a tarball containing the alternative template from http://mabishu.com/downloads/munin-alternative-template.tbz
    For installing just move the /etc/munin/templates to /etc/munin/templates_old, extract this tarball in /etc/munin/ and verify that this creates a new template folder.

  • http://jdasher.com James Dasher

    Fran,

    Thanks for posting the files, it doesn’t work unfortunately though.

    Checking a cache of the original host site via google.com it looks like there are two parts, the “templates” and the “www” folder part, at this point it just gives me a broken page. Any possibility of getting the second half?

    Regards,

    James

  • http://www.mabishu.com Fran Diéguez

    Sure,
    I have repackaged the tarball with the template and www folders. I hope it contents all the needed resources. Just check it out from the url I have posted in the previous comment.
    Regards

  • http://taxattorney.games36.com tax attorney

    Thanks dude. It was interesting knowing.

  • x2on

    Does somebody have the documentation from the template for installation and customization?

  • http://www.mabishu.com Fran Diéguez

    Hi x2on,

    seems that original page is down so let me review my documentation and I’ll update this post this week.

    but is pretty simple to install and customize it if you knows HTML and CSS

  • http://jeremyclarke.org Jeremy Clarke

    Thanks for unnofficially taking over this theme Fran, as far as I can tell it is the only one available online other than the one awkwardly posted to the Munin Trac.

    Unfortunately even with your instructions I can’t get the files in teh tarball to work. When I just do the /templates/ part I end up with a completely unstyled page and Firebug tells me that it got a 404 for a file at http://munin.mysite.com/css/index.css

    That’s annoying because the tarball only has a file called style.css and there’s no indication that it should go in /css/ in the web root of munin. Do you have such a file in your install that uses this theme? I tried uploading and renaming the style.css file into /css/index.css but the result is definitely not what was intended, and afterwards my munin only has a tiny bit more style than before (colored links but no layout).

    Any ideas on what could be the problem? Thanks for working on this, sorry that you have responsibility simply because you were the only one to post about the theme other than the original author who dissapeared :)

  • Peter

    I am experiencing the same problem, the generated HTML file is empty.

  • http://www.altenergyshift.com/ AltEnergyShift.com

    also don’t forget…
    chown -R root:root /etc/munin

  • http://www.altenergyshift.com/ AltEnergyShift.com

    nevermind this is broken :/

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